“When you think about it, there were 199 flights and 12 pilots – overall they did pretty good to get it down safely as many times as they did.” “When you’re going out there to double the speed record or triple the altitude records of other aircraft, obviously you’re getting into areas that are a little dangerous,” says Evans. Although McKay survived the crash, he lived the rest of his life in terrible pain until he died in 1975. “There were problems with the hydraulics and he had no flaps, so when he hit the lake bed the X-15 flipped over.” With the canopy jettisoned, the entire weight of the plane rested on his helmet. “McKay came down really fast,” says Evans. Or maybe the one that crushed the spine of Jack McKay in 1962. Perhaps the one that killed Mike Adams in 1967, after his plane went into a hypersonic spin and broke apart on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. A couple of the X-15s, however, are angled downwards to illustrate flights that failed. The horizontal ones represent speed attempts. Some of these X-15 images are angled upwards to represent high-altitude test flights. Where some aircraft might have representations of the planes they shot down or the bombs they dropped, this has pictures of X-15s – each signifying one of the 80 missions flown by this particular B-52. “It’s incredible,” says Stemm, “that the aircraft had enough surplus lift and wing area that they could make a substantial cut in it without having an effect on the aircraft’s performance.”Īs well as a sizeable chunk missing from the wing and the special adapter to hold the spaceplane, this special B-52 (also known as the NB-52A) also boasts unusual markings along the main fuselage. Adapting the B-52 involved cutting a section out of the starboard wing and slinging a pylon underneath.
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